“What will you do?” I asked, thinking about her, alone in the hills and unable to find the food that sustained her magic.
“There’s only one thing I can do.” Her voice broke for a second and became defiant, like a pebble tossed into the pool.
But then she looked at me, and her composure returned. “There’s only one thing we can do: Learn to survive.”
The railroad soon became a familiar part of the landscape: the black locomotive huffing through the green rice paddies, puffing steam and pulling a long train behind it, like a dragon coming down from the distant, hazy, blue mountains. For a while, it was a wondrous sight, with children marveling at it, running alongside the tracks to keep up.
But the soot from the locomotive chimneys killed the rice in the fields closest to the tracks, and two children playing on the tracks, too frightened to move, were killed one afternoon. After that, the train ceased to fascinate.
People stopped coming to Father and me to ask for our services. They either went to the Christian missionary or the new teacher who said he’d studied in San Francisco. Young men in the village began to leave for Hong Kong or Canton, moved by rumors of bright lights and well-paying work. Fields lay fallow. The village itself seemed to consist only of the too-old and too-young, their mood one of resignation. Men from distant provinces came to inquire about buying land for cheap.
Father spent his days sitting in the front room, Swallow Tail over his knee, staring out the door from dawn to dusk, as though he himself had turned into a statue.
Every day, as I returned home from the fields, I would see the glint of hope in Father’s eyes briefly flare up.
“Did anyone speak of needing our help?” he would ask.
“No,” I would say, trying to keep my tone light. “But I’m sure there will be a jumping corpse soon. It’s been too long.”
I would not look at my father as I spoke because I did not want to look as hope faded from his eyes.
Then, one day, I found Father hanging from the heavy beam in his bedroom. As I let his body down, my heart numb, I thought that he was not unlike those he had hunted all his life: they were all sustained by an old magic that had left and would not return, and they did not know how to survive without it.
Swallow Tail felt dull and heavy in my hand. I had always thought I would be a demon hunter, but how could I when there were no more demons, no more spirits? All the Daoist blessings in the sword could not save my father’s sinking heart. And if I stuck around, perhaps my heart would grow heavy and yearn to be still too.
I hadn’t seen Yan since that day six years ago, when we hid from the railroad surveyors at the temple. But her words came back to me now.
Learn to survive.
I packed a bag and bought a train ticket to Hong Kong.
The Sikh guard checked my papers and waved me through the security gate.
I paused to let my gaze follow the tracks going up the steep side of the mountain. It seemed less like a railroad track than a ladder straight up to heaven. This was the funicular railway, the tram line to the top of Victoria Peak, where the masters of Hong Kong lived and the Chinese were forbidden to stay.
But the Chinese were good enough to shovel coal into the boilers and grease the gears.
Steam rose around me as I ducked into the engine room. After five years, I knew the rhythmic rumbling of the pistons and the staccato grinding of the gears as well as I knew my own breath and heartbeat. There was a kind of music to their orderly cacophony that moved me, like the clashing of cymbals and gongs at the start of a folk opera. I checked the pressure, applied sealant on the gaskets, tightened the flanges, replaced the worn-down gears in the backup cable assembly. I lost myself in the work, which was hard and satisfying.
By the end of my shift, it was dark. I stepped outside the engine room and saw a full moon in the sky as another tram filled with passengers was pulled up the side of the mountain, powered by my engine.
“Don’t let the Chinese ghosts get you,” a woman with bright blond hair said in the tram, and her companions laughed.
It was the night of Yulan, I realized, the Ghost Festival. I should get something for my father, maybe pick up some paper money at Mongkok.
“How can you be done for the day when we still want you?” a man’s voice came to me.
“Girls like you shouldn’t tease,” another man said, and laughed.
I looked in the direction of the voices and saw a Chinese woman standing in the shadows just outside the tram station. Her tight western-style cheongsam and the garish makeup told me her profession. Two Englishmen blocked her path. One tried to put his arms around her, and she backed out of the way.
“Please. I’m very tired,” she said in English. “Maybe next time.”
“Now, don’t be stupid,” the first man said, his voice hardening. “This isn’t a discussion. Come along now and do what you’re supposed to.”
I walked up to them. “Hey.”
The men turned around and looked at me.
“What seems to be the problem?”
“None of your business.”
“Well, I think it is my business,” I said, “seeing as how you’re talking to my sister.”
I doubt either of them believed me. But five years of wrangling heavy machinery had given me a muscular frame, and they took a look at my face and hands, grimy with engine grease, and probably decided that it wasn’t worth it to get into a public tussle with a lowly Chinese engineer.
The two men stepped away to get in line for the Peak Tram, muttering curses.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It’s been a long time,” I said, looking at her. I swallowed the you look good. She didn’t. She looked tired and thin and brittle. And the pungent perfume she wore assaulted my nose.
But I did not think of her harshly. Judging was the luxury of those who did not need to survive.
“It’s the night of the Ghost Festival,” she said. “I didn’t want to work anymore. I wanted to think about my mother.”
“Why don’t we go get some offerings together?” I asked.
We took the ferry over to Kowloon, and the breeze over the water revived her a bit. She wet a towel with the hot water from the teapot on the ferry and wiped off her makeup. I caught a faint trace of her natural scent, fresh and lovely as always.
“You look good,” I said, and meant it.
On the streets of Kowloon, we bought pastries and fruits and cold dumplings and a steamed chicken and incense and paper money, and caught up on each other’s lives.
“How’s hunting?” I asked. We both laughed.
“I miss being a fox,” she said. She nibbled on a chicken wing absent-mindedly. “One day, shortly after that last time we talked, I felt the last bit of magic leave me. I could no longer transform.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, unable to offer anything else.
“My mother taught me to like human things: food, clothes, folk opera, old stories. But she was never dependent on them. When she wanted, she could always turn into her true form and hunt. But now, in this form, what can I do? I don’t have claws. I don’t have sharp teeth. I can’t even run very fast. All I have is my beauty, the same thing that your father and you killed my mother for. So now I live by the very thing that you once falsely accused my mother of doing: I lure men for money.”
“My father is dead, too.”